The Renaissance ran its course in Italy with strange indiffer ence to consequences. The five great Powers, held in equilibrium by Lorenzo de' Medici, dreamed that the peninsula could be main tained in statu quo by diplomacy. The Church saw no danger in encouraging a pseudo-pagan ideal of life, violating its own prin ciple of existence by assuming the policy of an aggrandizing secu lar state, and outraging Christendom openly by its acts and utter ances. Society at large was hardly aware that an intellectual force of stupendous magnitude and incalculable explosive power had been created by the new learning. Why should not established institutions proceed upon the customary and convenient methods of routine, while the delights of existence were augmented, man ners polished, arts developed and a golden age of epicurean ease made decent by a state religion which no one cared to break with because no one was left to regard it seriously? This was the atti tude of the Italians when the Renaissance, which they had initi ated as a thing of beauty, began to operate as a thing of power beyond the Alps.
Germany was already provided with universities, seven of which had been founded between 1348 and 1409. In these haunts of learning the new studies took root after the year 1440, chiefly through the influence of travelling professors, Peter Luder and Samuel Karoch. German scholars made their way to Lombard and Tuscan lecture-rooms, bringing back the methods of the human ists. Greek, Latin and Hebrew erudition soon found itself at home on Teutonic soil. Like Italian men of letters, these pio neers of humanism gave a classic turn to their patronymics : un familiar names, Crotus Rubeanus and Pierius Graecus, Capnion and Lupambulus Ganymedes, Oecolampadius and Melanchthon, resounded on the Rhine. A few of the German princes, among whom Maximilian, the prince cardinal Albert of Mainz, Frederick the Wise of Saxony, and Eberhard of Wiirttemberg deserve men tion, exercised a not insignificant influence on letters by the foun dation of new universities and the patronage of learned men. The cities of Strasbourg, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Basle, became centres of learned coteries which gathered round scholars like Wimphel ing, Brant, Peutinger, Schedel, and Pirckheimer, artists like DUrer and Holbein, painters of the eminence of Froben. Academies in
imitation of Italian institutions came into existence, the two most conspicuous named after the Rhine and the Danube, holding their headquarters respectively at Heidelberg and Vienna. Crowned poets, of whom the most eminent was Conrad Celtes Protucius (Pickel!) emulated the fame of Politian and Pontano. Yet though the Renaissance was thus widely communicated to the centres of German intelligence, it displayed a different character from that which it assumed in Italy. Gothic art, which was indigenous in Germany, yielded but little to southern influences. Such work as that of Diirer, Vischer, Cranach, Schongauer, Holbein, consum mate as it was in technical excellence, did not assume Italian forms of loveliness, did not display the paganism of the Latin races. The modification of Gothic architecture by pseudo-Roman elements of style was incomplete. What Germany afterwards took of the Palladian manner was destined to reach it on a cir cuitous route from France. In like manner the new learning failed to penetrate all classes of society with the rapidity of its expansion in Italy, nor was the new ideal of life and customs so easily substituted for the mediaeval. The German aristocracy, as Aeneas Sylvius had noticed, remained for the most part barba rous, addicted to gross pleasures, contemptuous of culture. The German dialects were too rough to receive that artistic elabora tion under antique influences which had been so facile in Tuscany. The doctors of the universities were too wedded to their anti quated manuals and methods, too satisfied with dullness, too proud of titles and diplomas, too anxious to preserve ecclesiasti cal discipline and to repress mental activity, for a genial spirit of humanism to spread freely. Not in Cologne or Tubingen but in Padua and Florence did the German pioneers of the Renaissance acquire their sense of liberal studies. And when they returned home they found themselves encumbered with stupidities, jeal ousies and rancours. Moreover the temper of these more en lightened men was itself opposed to Italian indifference and im morality ; it was pugnacious and polemical, eager to beat down the arrogance of monks and theologians rather than to pursue an ideal of aesthetical self-culture. To a student of the origins of German humanism it is clear that something very different from the Renaissance of Lorenzo de' Medici and Leo X. was in prepara tion from the first upon Teutonic soil. Far less plastic and form loving than the Italian, the German intelligence was more pene trative, earnest, disputative, occupied with substantial problems. Starting with theological criticism, proceeding to the stage of solid studies in the three learned languages, German humanism occu pied the attention of a widely scattered sect of erudite scholars; but it did not arouse the interest of the whole nation until it was forced into a violently militant attitude by Pfefferkorn's attack on Reuchlin. That attempt to extinguish honest thought prepared the Reformation ; and humanism after 1518 was absorbed in po litico-religious warfare.